Tuesday, February 21, 2006

I enjoyed as much as the next guy the comic ironies to be found in the Cheney hunting accident kerfuffle. ("The best intelligence estimates at the time indicated that there were birds in the brush." Heh.) But some people are all over this as if it were Watergate. Enough already. Hunting is a dangerous sport, and sometimes, regrettably, accidents happen. End of story. So there might have been some innocuous discrepancies in how the incident got initially reported and handled, but then not every hunter has his own personal chase team comprising secret service and an ambulance. The 18-hour gap in notifying the local authorities is just not of the same order as the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon's tapes. The MoveOn crowd need to just move on. (And you too, Andrew.)I think Arianna hit it best with her psychological explanation for the overreaction to this incident as a lover's quarrel between Cheney and the press. It's too bad the press can't keep up their fire at more proper targets, like torture, Plamegate, wiretapping, or the newly discovered executive powers of the vice-president (the bi-unitary executive theory?).